


Anxiously Awaiting Your Return

by EpiphanyBlue



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Javert Survives, Inner Dialogue, M/M, Missing Persons, Valjean's Chronic Hero Syndrome is stressful to others
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-06-10
Packaged: 2017-12-14 13:57:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/837656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EpiphanyBlue/pseuds/EpiphanyBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He left a simple note. That was nearly a week ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anxiously Awaiting Your Return

The man had been missing for five days now.  
Five.  
He had left such a simple note. So optimistic, so spare, so—Jean Valjean.  
His son-in-law had got on the wrong side of some street gang, who knows how or why. And for some reason he had thought it was good to interfere. This, if anything, was Javert’s place. What was Jean supposed to do around a band of criminals?  
No, the irony did not escape Javert.  
Things had changed, though- and that was the trouble. If Jean could bring himself to trust Javert, then Javert had to wonder, who else would he be willing to trust? However unwise his decision. His infinite capacity for what he called compassion, what he called forgiveness, would get him in trouble. So Javert had been telling him again and again, for half a year now at least.  
 _Wait, half of a...? Well then._  
Plus, say this was the Patron-Minette gang, as it nearly always was. They had subdued Jean before. Javert had caught the end of the episode, but only recently had he learned the whole story. The gang- the rodent, the sewer rat Thénardier, specifically- had come within moments of slitting his throat. Javert had fancied (there was no other word for it) that he himself, with his colleagues and assistants, had stepped in at just the proper moment and saved Valjean’s life.  
He had been wrong.  
The thing that had saved the man’s life was not the police themselves but the threat thereof—a scribbled note, wrapped around a rock and thrown through a window at the last possible moment. Before Javert set foot in that room.  
He had not saved him then.  
This time, he could not so much as find him.  
 _Or his-_  
 _STOP THAT._  
 _It would just kill you, wouldn't it? Even the thought that you could-_  
 _Enough. This is absurd._  
 _It's true though, isn't it? It'strue._  
 _Entirely true, and entirely useless. You ought to know..._  
 _Of course._  
 _When something is not working, I get rid of it._  
 _You try your damnedest, anyhow. And no exceptions._  
 _No exceptions._  
He gave himself a sardonic smile. It did not last.  


When not on assignment (because he still worked, he still needed it, albeit differently), Javert had spent the last five days searching all of Paris, examining every known bed and source of criminal activity in the city. Sometimes, with backup. More often, without. Valjean would be furious to know what he was doing, the risks he was taking, the cuts and blows he had already received in scouring all these locations.  
“You’ll get yourself killed,” he would say.  
And Javert would answer. “That’s what you get for leaving me alone.”

Alone. He was alone now. He had been alone all his life. Alone was a terrible thing to be. But a man being alone didn’t necessarily know that it was so terrible— unless, even once, he had not been it.

So many interruptions, so many long walks, so many rounds, quite a few arrests made, so many places scouted, investigated, cleared out, and Valjean stubbornly refused to be found. Of course, Valjean would not refuse to be found. That was not a thing that he would do.  
 _Not to me. Not anymore-_  
 _What makes you think **you’re** so important?_  
 _There is no question of thought, belief or conviction. I know what I know._  
 _I know what I know..._  
He knew that Valjean had not intended to be gone a week. Admittedly Valjean had not known when he would be back, but it should not have been this long, it should never have been this long. And still Javert wondered and waited. Every day the search consoled him- or distracted him, more so. Every day he remembered.  
He remembered a man who would not leave. That man was missing.  
Jean Valjean was missing, and there was no consolation.  
So every day was spent in search, and every search was fruitless, and every fruitless day brought wretched evenings and terrible anxious nights. Javert would put himself to bed and the darkness would be unfamiliar, the quiet would invade his ears, and he would panic. He would be anxious, his mind racing through every possible fate, thinking of every horrifying outcome for that terrible, foolish man he cherished and adored beyond what he had thought possible. The man he loved better than any feature of the world. Better than life, for what was his life now without him? Not only that, but he had been thinking, and he was now convinced that he would exchange his own life for the other man’s in a second.  
Which really seemed more like something Jean would do.  


Perhaps that was what he had done—what he was doing right now.  
 _And you will never know..._

Javert put his head in his hands. He tried to silence or to block out his own thoughts, with little success. He did manage to block out the sound of a window being pried open in the back room.  
He was more attuned to the sound of footsteps in the hall.  
He thought for sure he was imagining it. Still, he raised his head and tentatively turned around. There was a familiar figure in the doorway. His face was bruised, a sleeve torn, and one leg bandaged, and yet—  


“We may have to leave Paris for a while.”

Javert rose from his seat and crossed the room in a single step. He took Valjean’s right arm and examined it for injuries, then did the same with the left. Then looked up, with an expression at once a question and a cry. He had been cut and was only now allowed to bleed, he had been drained to exhaustion and was only now allowed to rest, he had been bound and could only now move, he had been burned or shocked or struck- or all of those things- and was only now allowed to yell. He had been shut up within his head and only now could he speak.  
"I thought you were dead. Do not leave me to the mercy of those thoughts again." He wrapped Jean in an abrupt but fervent embrace.  
Valjean responded to the embrace in kind, leaning his head against Javert’s. He took in the familiar scent of him, the warmth of his body, and once again hearing his voice.  
"For I am now fairly certain that I love you." This in a tone straight as a cast-iron beam, though he spoke it into Valjean's ear, or moreso into his hair.  
Valjean thought that his very heart would stop. But it kept running as usual, the only interval a small gasp.   
Javert was the master of making a statement so blunt that most people would miss the depth of it. Valjean, however, had a taste for simple facts, as in his life he posessed so few of them. He rubbed ellipses into Javert's back with a steady, reassuring hand, trying to let him know that the relief was mutual- That now returning to his presence, for the first time in nearly a week, he, Jean Valjean, was comfortable. He spoke merely to reinforce the thought. “It is the same for me,” he said. “I love you, and I have missed you, and I am sorry if you were afraid for me.”  
"I was terrified,” Javert admitted.  
Merely by looking at his face once they had pulled apart, Valjean could believe it.

“…But what on Earth was that you said about leaving town?”


End file.
